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A Musical Palindrome

As many people on the internet have pointed out, today (February 2, 2020) is an 8-digit calendrical palindrome—02/02/2020. A palindrome, of course, is a word or phrase that reads the same backwards and forwards. Some of the classics are

“Madam, I’m Adam”

(the first words ever spoken?). Or Napoleon’s supposed lament,

“Able was I, ere I saw Elba.”

Palindromes can also be musical, and I thought today was the perfect day to talk about a musical palindrome composed by Franz Joseph Haydn.

Franz Joseph Haydn

Haydn has always been one of my favorite composers, ever since I was a child and my mother supplied me with Lives of the Composers children’s books (still probably the source of much of my knowledge of music history). I loved the music, of course—I think I’m a classicist at heart—but I was also attracted to the way these biographies presented Haydn’s personality. The Haydn of my youthful reading was playful, with an irreverent sense of humor.

One example of this playfulness is his Symphony no. 94 in G major, composed in 1792 during the first of his visits to London. It is known as the “Surprise Symphony” from the fortissimo chord in the second movement that follows several bars of a pianissimo melody. According to legend, the chord was supposed to have awakened sleepy concert-goers who had feasted too heavily on English roast beef.1 Or take Symphony no. 45 in F# minor (1772), nicknamed the “Farewell” Symphony. Haydn spent much of his career as the Kapellmeister at the court of Prince Esterhazy in Hungary, composing and directing music for the entertainment of the court. When the Prince kept the musicians working for too long a time without a vacation (no Musicians’ Union in those days), Haydn responded by composing the Finale of the symphony so that one by one the musicians leave the stage, extinguishing their candles as they go until finally there is nothing but silent darkness. The Prince got the message.

With these examples in mind, I was delighted to discover an instance of Haydn’s musical wit in a piano composition that is playable for someone at my level. This is the Minuet movement from Haydn’s Piano Sonata in A major, Hob. XVI.262 The movement is marked “Minuet al Rovescio,” which means “Minuet in Reverse.” The first half of the Minuet is ten measures long, followed by another 10 measures that are the reverse of the first ten. In my edition, produced for student use, the second half is written out, but in the original publication, the pianist was expected to play the second half by starting at the end and reading backwards—right to left and bottom to top. What a mental workout that would be!

To make it clearer, here are the first and last measures of the Minuet. You can see how the second is the reverse of the first.

Measure 1 of Haydn’s “Minuet al Rovescio”
Final measure of Haydn’s “Minuet al Rovescio”

The twelve measures of the Trio section work the same way—measures one to twelve are played forwards, and then twelve to one are played backwards.

I was so intrigued by the structure of this Minuet that I decided to see what else I could find out about it, and I discovered that Haydn must have liked it so much that he used it twice. He originally composed it in about 1772 as the Minuet movement for his Symphony no. 47 in G major, which I was delighted to discover has the nickname “Palindrome” from this very movement.

I was also delighted to discover, when I went to imslp.org to get the music for the above images, that the site also had a transcription of the Minuet for violin and piano, done by Ferdinand David, the violinist for whom Mendelssohn wrote his violin concerto. That’s going on my to-be-played list!

I’m sure that Haydn was more complex, both as a man and as a composer, than the way he was presented in the biographies I read as a child, but I am delighted to be able to learn to play this small example of his inventiveness.

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Music and History, National Anthem Edition: Germany

National anthems, as the name implies, are an expression of nationalism. Cultural nationalism is the belief that one’s own nation, or Volk, to use the nineteenth-century terminology, is unique and should be celebrated. Picture children in folk costumes dancing folk dances and singing folk tunes at a folk festival. A political nationalist believes that the most natural form of political organization is the nation-state. If you don’t have one, the true patriot must work to get one, either by breaking up a multi-national state or by unifying many states into one nation. Unification into a single nation-state was the dream of both German and Italian nationalists in the nineteenth century, and this process influenced the developments of both national anthems. Germany today, Italy to follow!

While Russia’s national anthem changed with every change of regime, the anthem of Germany has remained surprisingly constant. The national anthem of Germany is the Deutschlandlied (“Song of Germany”), also known, from its original opening words, as “Deutschland über alles.” First adopted in 1922, it remained as the German national anthem through the Weimar Republic, the Nazi era, postwar West Germany, and the post-cold war re-united Germany.

“Deutschland über alles” is a national anthem like the Marseillaise, but it originated as a royal anthem, and not for Germany. The tune was composed by Franz Josef Haydn in 1797 to celebrate the birthday of the Holy Roman Emperor Francis II. Haydn had visited London in 1794-95 (one of the trips for which the London Symphonies were written) and had been impressed by hearing “God Save the King.” Since in 1797 Austria was at war with revolutionary France, it seemed like a good time to have an Austrian equivalent to Britain’s anthem. Haydn’s composition was given lyrics by Lorenz Leopold Haschka and titled “Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser,” or “God Save Emperor Francis”; it is also known as the Kaiserhymne. Haydn used the same melody again in one of my favorite string quartets, Opus 76 no. 3, now nicknamed the Emperor or Kaiser Quartet. The Kaiserhymne served as the anthem of the Austrian Empire until its dissolution in 1918.

Portrait of Franz Josef Haydn, by Thomas Hardy

Meanwhile, a liberal German nationalist poet, August Heinrich von Fallersleben, wrote new words for Haydn’s tune to promote German unification. In this context, “Deutschland über alles” refers to placing a united Germany over its constituent parts, not necessarily over other nations. The new combination of Haydn’s music and Fallersleben’s words was sung by the liberal revolutionaries of 1848. But when Germany was finally unified in 1871 as an empire ruled by the Kaiser, the new government found the song to be too identified with liberal republicanism and instead chose a German version of, you guessed it, “God Save the Queen.”

When, like the Austrian Empire, the German Empire ceased to exist after World War I, its replacement, known as the Weimar Republic, chose the Deutschlandlied to reinforce its break with the recent imperial past and its connection to the earlier 19th-century liberal republicanism (liberal in the 19th-century sense and republican in its constitutional sense of a non-monarchical elected government).

When the Weimar Republic fell in its turn in 1933, the Nazis kept the anthem, but now the words “Deutschland über alles” took on a different meaning. The Nazis also paired the Deutschlandlied with the song of the Nazi party, the “Horst Wessel Song.” After World War II, the new West German government stuck with the Deutschlandlied, but without the problematic first verse, with its Nazi associations, or the second, which sounds like a sexist drinking song. West Germans sang only the third verse, which celebrates unity, justice, and freedom (Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit). Although East Germany had its own anthem from 1949-1990, Auferstanden aus Ruinen (“Risen from the Ruins”), after 1991, the third verse of the Deutschlandlied was adopted by reunited Germany, emblematic of the dominant position of the former West Germany in the post-Cold War era.

Next: do you know the Italian national anthem?